We take the view of ‘learning as a conversational process’, and argue that this can be extended to include the notions of peer-group interactions among students, tutors, and even artificial agents. This in turn lends itself to an approach to distributed conversation which builds upon modern Instant Messaging tools, and extends such tools to include what we call enhanced presence: a way of monitoring the availability of (and interacting with) fellow students and tutors at a distance. We describe a scenario being developed in the recently-started European Learning Grid Infrastructure ‘ELeGI’ project, deploying our own BuddySpace tools, and describe the novel contributions that this approach can bring to e-learning.